A blog about games.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Both new consoles are announced, the specs of both consoles are known, so let's compare the next-gen hardware!

CPU
The PlayStation 4 has a x86 AMD Jaguar processor, with 8 cores. It's clocked at 1.6 GHz. The Xbox One has a custom Microsoft CPU with also 8 cores. The Xbox One CPU is probably based on an AMD processor. The CPU of both consoles is nearly the same, so no one is stronger or better than the other.

GPU
The GPU of the PS4 is an AMD Radeon chip with 1152 stream processors and a 1.84 TFlops core. The Xbox One has 768 stream processors and a 1.2 TFlops core. The PS4 has clearly a much stronger GPU than the Xbox One.

RAM
The PS4 will have a 8 GB GDDR5 GPU which runs at 5.5 GHz with a maximum bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The Xbox One will have a 8 GB DDR3 GPU which runs at 2.133 GHz with a maximum bandwidth of 68.3GB/s, but it also has a 32MB ESRAM-cache which creates a maximum bandwidth of 102GB/s. The PS4 is again much stronger. The PlayStation 4 OS uses 1 GB of memory and the Xbox One OS uses 3 GB, so the PS4 has much more RAM than the Xbox One.

Hard disk
The hard disc of the PS4 is not known, but rumours suggest that it will get 500 GB in the basic version. The Xbox One will have a hard disc of 500 GB, so no difference on this part. The consoles don't have a SSD, probably because of the price.

Motion
The PS4 will have PlayStation Move and the controller has SIXAXIS to track your movements. The Xbox One will have Kinect 2.0. Kinect 2.0 is super, it works great and can track every movement very accurate. The Xbox One is clearly the best if you look at the motion sensors.

Connections
Both consoles have USB 3.0, Bluetooth 2.1 and HDMI output with 4K support. The PS4 also has the classic A/V analog output for the older tv's. The Xbox One has two HDMI outputs and the PS4 has one HDMI output. The Xbox has one extra because you can connect your tv receiver to it.

Conclusion
If you only look at the specs, the PlayStation 4 is the big winner. If you like movement games, the Xbox one is absolutely the best of the two consoles thanks to Kinect 2.0. The Xbox One has one extra HDMI input, so you could see that as an advantage, but the PlayStation 4 has A/V output, so no console has a real advantage on the connections.